The Pearl Fisher?/ of Ceylon. 385 



but it more frequently occurs that several hundred oysters do 

 not t^eld a single pearl. The small, valueless pearls, called 

 also '• seed pearls," are burnt down, and sold as pearl-lime 

 to the wealthy Malays, by whom it is used as a luxurious 

 addition to the betel and cabbage nuts, as masticatories. 

 The Ceylonese mix the lustreless pearls with other grains, with 

 which they feed the poultry, in whose croops the pearls regain 

 their former brilliancy after a few minutes' grinding. The 

 croop is then slit up, and the glittering stones extracted, white 

 as the most beautiful pearl-muscular tissue.* 



The pearl oysters caught on the coast of Ceylon are all of 

 the same species {Meleagrina Margaritifera), uniformly 

 oval in shape, and about 9J inches in circumference. The 

 number taken in Ceylon annually must be numbered by 

 millions. In the year of our arrival to Ceylon (1858), the 

 pearl fishery yielded of^24,120. According to the last returns, 

 before us as we write, there were in the year 1859, 1352 boats 

 engaged during eighteen days in the pearl fishery, the gross 

 take of which amounted to 9,534,951 oysters, sold for £48,216. 

 The divers' shares amounted together to 2,126,749 oysters. 



The wide-spread popular delusion, that the pearl in the 



* Tills method of procedure, wliich is adopted by the rest of the Indian races, and in 

 which the lustreless pearls are swallowed by hens, pigeons, and ducks, so as to be 

 polished up, after being subjected to the preliminary digestion of these birds, has 

 been proved to be anything but beneficial to the pearls as regards loss by attrition. 

 Careful observation has estabhshed, for example, that four pearls, weigliing twelve 

 grains, have lost four gi*ains by undergoing this process during twelve hours, while 

 eight others, weighing tliirty gi-ains, were reduced to twenty grains after a sojourn of 

 two days in the gizzard of a duck. 



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